(REUTERS) 30 October 2006

If you were to design a phone expressly to be used by women, what functions would you give it? The Japanese designer Momoko Ikuta added things you might think of: a pastel paisley look for example. Also something you might think useful, a camouflage melody, which you can trigger to pretend to take a call to avoid unwanted attention.

But would you have thought of an alarm, one that rings only twice a month? First, it rings three days before the user’s time of highest fertility and the second time it rings means it’s time to get pregnant!

The hope is that it will raise the very low Japanese birth rate.